Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Today, we start to tackle one of the most visible issues you will likely face in your ministry – discipline and the child of divorce.

• Children of divorce live in a world where they feel like they have no control over anything. Oftentimes, that leads to them acting out or lashing out in their behavior. They misbehave as a means of getting attention and as a way of exerting the little bit of control they do have left over their lives. You have likely seen these discipline problems in your ministry and dealt with these kids, yet you may never have realized that the root of these problems was in dealing with family disruption. In the coming weeks, we will look at specific things you can do and techniques you can use in terms of discipline and children of divorce, but before we do that, it’s important to step back and take a broader view of the issue of discipline and children of divorce.

What Is Discipline?

At its root, discipline has to be about discipleship. It’s right there in the root of the word. We when we talk about any discipline, whether for the child of divorce or otherwise, it is important to keep the goal in mind. The goal must be to disciple the child – to guide them and teach them to make right and God honoring choices. Discipleship, and therefore discipline, has to be about the heart of the child. As such, the ability to discipline boils down to relationship. Continue reading

Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. The world of a child of divorced or separated parents is marked by chaos. Chances are that your Sunday morning children’s ministry may also include just a touch of controlled chaos. When those two worlds meet, it is easy to lose track of kids.

So, what processes do you have in place to follow-up on kids who are no longer coming to your church? Do you know which kids have recently experienced a family transition so you can make sure to follow-up on them? Are you small group leaders equipped and empowered to follow-up on the kids in their group who stop coming to church? Statistics show that children from non-intact families are more likely than their counterparts from intact families to stop going to church following the family transition, and you need to have a means of makings sure that these kids do not fall through the cracks.

In our culture, it is no longer unusual for a child to miss a week or more of church each month. But, if I child stops coming altogether, it is critical that you follow-up with the child and with the family. This is especially important as children transfer between age groups and between small group leaders when it is especially easy for them to get “lost in the shuffle.”

Here are some steps you can take at your church to help make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks and you are following up on missing kids: Continue reading

Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children from disrupted homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. This week we are looking at a simple thing that you can do that doesn’t require any additional volunteers or committee approval or an overhaul of the way you “do church.” This week we are looking at the difference between empathy and pity and why it is so important that you be able to empathize with the children from disrupted home in your ministry.

The first thing we need to understand is the difference between empathy and pity. Dictionary.com defines pity as:

“Sympathetic or kindly sorrow evoked by the suffering, distress, or misfortune of another.”

Pity expresses itself as “Oh, I’m so sorry for what you are going through,” or “Isn’t it terrible what it happening with little Suzy’s family.” Although it is often offered from a very heartfelt position, pity is the last thing a child of divorce or child from any other disrupted family situation needs or wants. They don’t want you to feel sorry for them. Instead of helping, pity strips the child of dignity and turns them into to someone to feel sorry for.

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Welcome back to Sunday Morning Strategies, a series looking at ideas you can implement in your children’s ministry and church to be more accommodating to children from disrupted homes.  In the last installment, we looked at some of the reasons it can be difficult to form relationships with kids from disrupted families.  This week, we are looking at seven things you need to do in order to overcome the barriers and develop lasting relationships with children of divorce and children from separated homes.

1. Know Your Role

In trying to develop a relationship with children of divorce, it is important that you are clear about exactly what your role is. You cannot, nor should you try to, replace a parent who has left and/or abandoned the child. You can be a friend, an advocate, a teacher, a role model, a confidant and so much more, but you will never replace that missing parents. It is important to accept that and establish those boundaries from the get go.

When dealing with hurting kids, it is natural to want to make the pain go away. Unfortunately, that is neither your role nor the best thing for the child of divorce. Dealing with pain is key to grieving process, and one of the worse things you can do is try to “happy up” the child of divorce. Continue reading

Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. For the last several installments, we have looked at different strategies for dealing with parents from divorced homes. In the coming weeks, we are going to look at developing relationships with children of divorce.  This week, we will examine some of the difficulties inherent in forming such relationships, and in the coming weeks we will look at some strategies you can employ to develop these relationships.

The Importance of Relationships

Relationships are key to any type of ministry. Ultimately, our goal is that the kids in our ministry will form a relationship with Jesus Christ. Toward that end, we endeavor to form relationships with these kids and to afford them opportunities to form relationships with one another. The relationships we develop with the children in our ministries allow us to speak into their lives and to model Christian living for them.

The Difficulty of Forming Relationships With Children of Divorce

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Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Two weeks ago we started a series on issues related to dealing with parents and we identified three different types of divorced parents you are likely to deal with:

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

This week we conclude our series by looking at the Other Parent.

3. The Other Parent

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Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Last week we started a series on issues related to dealing with parents and we identified three different types of divorced parents you are likely to deal with:

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

This week we continue our series by looking at the Absent Parents.

2. The Absent Parent

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Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Last week we looked at specific legal issues you need to be aware of when it comes to divorce. Over the course of the next few weeks, we are going to look at parent issues that you need to be prepared to deal with if the kids in your ministry have parents who are separated or divorced.

In a more traditional children’s ministry setting, our interactions with parents are generally driven by the idea of equipping them to disciple their own children on a daily basis. The ultimate goal with divorced or separated parents, but the methods sometimes need to be a little different. In this series, we will look at three different “types” of divorced parents that you are likely to deal with in your ministry and how you as a children’s pastor and a church need to address them.

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

1. The Warring Parents

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Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In this installment we are going to explore some of the legal issues related to a divorce or separation that you need to be aware of in terms of your children’s ministry and the safety of the children left in your care. This advice is given from the perspective of a children’s ministry worker and should not be construed as legal advice. You should check with your attorney or insurance carrier for specific advice or requirements for your church.

Custody Issues

The biggest legal concern you should have as someone entrusted by at least one parent with the care of their child(ren) is any custody issue that may arise out of the divorce or current requirements related to the child. The last thing you want to do is to be responsible for releasing a child to a parent who is not supposed to have custody of the child for some reason or another. Even if that parent is a member of your congregation, you have a responsibility to adhere to any court ordered or agreed visitation and custody schedule.

Make sure that you have a plan in place for who can pick up all of the children in your ministry, but this is particularly important in the case of a contentious custody battle. In our Divorce Ministry classes, we ask parents to let us know if someone other than they will be picking up the child, and we still require photo ID before we will release the child. I explain to all of the parents in orientation that I would rather annoy a grandma and grandpa than do anything to endanger the welfare of their child(ren). We also ask specifically if there is anyone who is not allowed to pick up the child. All volunteers should be made aware of this situation in order to avoid releasing the child to the “wrong” parent.

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Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry or church service. The goal of this series is to equip you to better minister to the children in your church who come to you from non-traditional family structures. In a prior installment, we addressed the need to train volunteers to minister to children from divorced and single-parent homes and some strategies for undertaking that training.

However, just training the volunteers you already have may not be enough. You should also consider “targeted recruiting” to specifically find and recruit volunteers who will be able to relate to, and empathize with, children from divorced, separated and single-parent homes. By having some of these specialized volunteers spread throughout your ministry, you can help to ensure that a hurting a child has someone who can relate to them in their time of greatest need. These volunteers will bring a needed skill set and benefits to your ministry including:

• A unique ability to understand and appreciate the circumstances children of divorced and separated parents are experiencing.
• A sounding board for kids who are convinced that no one really knows that they are going through or cares.
• An innate ability to recognize when the underlying issue that is bothering a child has to do with their parents’ divorce or separation. Adults who experienced divorce as a child seem to have this sixth sense when it comes to understanding children who are currently going through it.

While it is possible to train your existing volunteers in these areas, finding people who already possess these gifts will help both you and the kids in your ministry. Here are some prime candidates who will bring a new perspective to your ministry and the ability to minister to children of divorce and children from single-parent homes: Continue reading